Ask A Millennial: Chivalry

Chivalry Ain't What It Used To Be - For Good Reason

Got a question about anything millennial-related? Email Ian at theianlang@gmail.com.

Millennials — if there’s one thing pundits enjoy discussing more than our professional ambitions and our spending habits, it’s the way we go about bumping uglies with one another. “Hookup culture” is a popular phrase, and people talk about things like online dating and casual sex as though they were things invented by and exclusively for the millennial generation. “Millennials have killed dating,” they say, as though it’s of any consequence to members of other generations, given that we likely wouldn’t be dating them anyway.

The “dating is dead” theme walks hand-in-hand with another equally insidious concept: the abandonment of chivalry. Of course, “chivalry is dead” is not a new gag or lamentation — I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of the expression, used either in a tongue-in-cheek sense or as a genuine complaint. But in this context, it’s different. There’s a growing cadre of self-hating millennials who use the “let me tell you what’s wrong with my generation” schtick to get website hits, and the apparent lack of chivalry today is a popular tool they use to dismiss millennial men as childlike and generally “less than.”

I have a problem with this.

For one thing, “chivalry” evolved almost entirely out of the military ethos — it was a lot more about defending your country than about throwing jackets over mud puddles. But that’s fine, we take and re-appropriate words all the time. Modern chivalry is tough to define, but, near as I can tell, it’s a blanket term used to describe behaviors, attitudes and social norms intended to protect women from harm. Chivalry encourages us to not only avoid harming women but to actively deliver them from it, if need be. In the context of its origination, that’s fine — 19th century ladies be needin’ protection, I guess. In that way, it becomes kind of a selfless thing — a burden to be shouldered by all men. In that selflessness lies its value. The original ideals of chivalry promoted generosity and courtesy towards everyone, after all.

That selflessness is where things begin to go awry. Think of the storylines you probably remember from 20 or so years ago — “Man, with all this feminism, women won’t even let me open doors for them. They can do it themselves.” Now, it’s a little more direct. “I am chivalrous, as all men should be. Our women deserve better,” say the present-day me-woers.

Notice what’s really being said in both of those scenarios. Despite the premise that chivalry is about valuing women, the bemoaners make it about them. They won’t “let” you open doors for them, meaning they won’t “let” you take a meaningless transaction and turn it into a demonstration of your value as a mate. When the fedora crowd whines about women dating unchivalrous jerks, they’re really saying “if everyone were more chivalrous, like me, I’d have a better chance of getting my d*ck wet.” They’re basically decrying the fact that behaviors they’ve decided should benefit them no longer do, and they aren’t happy about it.